Polygamy-police issue stuns Hildale

During the first six months of this year, the Hildale/Colorado City police department responded to more than 2,500 calls for service. Of those, 31 percent were calls from Hildale residents, according to police records.

"The police service is great," Zitting said. "I don't know why they'd want to disrupt that."

Zitting said Shurtleff's aggressive stance toward the Colorado City/Hildale officers is only an attempt to highlight the attorney general's political agenda.

"They've been making such a strong issue of this, and saying they weren't prosecuting polygamy," Zitting said. "Now they turn right around and do the opposite. As soon as they got finality on the Rodney Holm case, they start doing what they said they wouldn't do."

Holm's attorney, Rod Parker, said Shurtleff is opening up a can of worms that won't be easy to close.

"I was hesitant to say this before, but I have no doubt now that this is politically motivated," said Parker, who also represents the FLDS church. "He really needs to think carefully about what he's doing to the psyche of the community out there. [Polygamy is] not going away. He needs to work with that community."

Roundy said he finds Shurtleff's attempts to strip his Arizona officers of their Utah certification almost laughable.

"I'll let Shurtleff do the research on whether my officers are married to more than one wife or not," said Roundy, implying that Shurtleff's investigation would prove his officers are either single or in monogamous relationships. "These officers are very professional. We do our job. We don't let anything go by. Shurtleff is making some false statements."

Shurtleff also told the Deseret Morning News that his staff tried to serve subpoenas for church records of marriages involving teenage girls but was kept waiting more than three hours while Hildale officers "called" church officials, only to say later that no one planned to respond.

"That is a total falsehood," Roundy said. "They asked us to make a call and we did. I sent a police officer with them on every one of their attempts. Nobody hindered them from knocking on a door to serve a subpoena. Arizona came in earlier and we did the same thing to try to help them."

Washington County Sheriff Kirk Smith said Shurtleff is right even though he believes the police do a good job. "They're a top-flight organization out there," Smith said, "but they still have to be in compliance with the law to be a certified police officer."

Where to draw the line is a tough issue facing society, Smith added. "Do you decertify an officer who is getting a divorce and begins living with a girlfriend? There's a lot more to it than whether you believe in polygamy or not."

Former Colorado City sheriff Sam Barlow said his Arizona certification was challenged in the 1980s but he prevailed.

"The investigator and I talked a lot about whether a person can still be loyal to the U.S. Constitution and still organize his family according to his religious convictions," said Barlow. "It certainly isn't criminal conduct to raise a family, or to raise two families."

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